About Lynn Chadwick

Lynn Chadwick was part of a generation of British sculptors who surprised audiences at the 1952 Venice Biennale by breaking with the tradition of carving sculpture from wood or stone. Instead, he welded iron and bronze rods into expressionistic, figurative works inspired by the human form and animals that nonetheless hovered close to abstraction. In his New York Times obituary, Ken Johnson noted, “In the 1950's [Chadwick] developed a spiky vocabulary of skeletal lines and rough planes organized into generalized images of people or animals that evoked feelings of pain, rage and fear.” He rejected what he saw as the amorphousness of stone, preferring to work with iron because it allowed him to “do a three dimensional drawing…which has a very definite shape.” In that sense, his work shared something with architecture, the field he originally pursued in his early career.